Today the tour is on foot through the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C. Rudi and I found ourselves with a free evening, so we headed out to check out this year’s Georgetown Glow light installation.

This nighttime extravaganza of light, video, color, and interactivity is in its eighth year, and while this year covered less ground than some previous years, it was still lots of fun with five pieces around the waterfront and shopping district of the neighborhood.

First up on M Street was “Light Falls” by Leandro Mendes-Vigas, a light and sound installation designed to recall Mendes-Vigas’ Brazilian Amazon rainforest and cleverly concocted out of two stories’ worth of duct hoses:

Threading our way past construction, rowdy students taking a break from finals, and closed storefronts, Rudi and I headed toward the river. At the entrance to Washington Harbor, we found our first interactive display with “Picto Sender Machine,” by Felipe Prado:

At first, it just looks like a color-changing display of screens, which would have been fun enough on its own. But then you read the sign and realize that you can do this with it:

After playing for a bit, we walked along the Potomac over to where the fountain is during the summer to get to our third installation, Alicia Eggert’s “All the Light You See”:

We head up Wisconsin Avenue to the Episcopalian Church, where we found a yard of butterflies:

Masamichi Shimada’s “Butterfly Effect” is probably the most subtle of the light displays, with the various panels on the butterfly wings shifting through bluish-purply hues over time, but it was very pretty.

Rather than stay on the street to get to the final Georgetown Glow installation, we crossed the bridge by Georgetown Park (kind of a weird mall-ish space, but also the spot where Andre Agassi literally ran into my mother) and their light display:

On the other side of the mall, we reached the final installation, another fun interactive one:

Cloud swings! The one I opted to grab wasn’t working properly, but if you swung on the other two, they changed from white to varying colors and brightness depending on how fast and hard you moved. “The Cloud Swing” was created by Lindsay Glatz and Curious Form.

Thanks for coming along with us on our tour of Georgetown Glow!

Here are the initials of the titles of 25 conventional Christmas tunes. Can you figure them all out? (All initials are capitalized, regardless of whether the word should be in the title.)

1. OCT
2. JTTW
3. GKW
4. SN
5. OCAYF
6. TLDB
7. GTIOTM
8. TFN
9. FTS
10. HTHAS
11. OHN
12. RTRNR
13. OLTOB
14. SB
15. AIAM
16. IHTBOCD
17. DTH
18. JB
19. AWHHOH
20. GRYMG
21. WCIT
22. SCICTT
23. UOTH
24. WC
25. ITMWTOTY

I’ll post the answers over the weekend. Have fun!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Susan invites me to come to the book sale she’s helping to run for her daughter’s elementary school and pitch in for a while. It’s nice to be useful — and to have some of my Christmas shopping benefit others.

2. Anna invites me to come see her office before our volleyball game. She works for a nonprofit that helps get books into teachers’ hands and she’s decorated a wall of with spreads from unbound picture book proofs. Our friend Neal joins us and he draws on her white board for her.

3. I walk toward the Georgetown Safeway to get cat litter, but en route, stop at a playground to swing for a while and then at Book Hill to watch the tail end of the sunset.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

The Virtual Advent Tour heads back out on the road today to Rudi at Random Duck. He’s got a tremendous holiday show for your pleasure today, bound only by the best Christmas musical presentations of all time.

Give yourself some time to check this one out!

Today on the Virtual Advent Tour, I’ve got a holiday book review for you:

It is December 1985 in an Irish village in Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These, and Bill Furlong and his wife and five daughters are preparing for Christmas.

Bill runs a small coal delivery company, and it’s been an okay year for them. Not everyone can pay their bill, but enough people can that he can afford not to chase after the families he knows can’t. As a small business owner, he’s able to keep some people employed, even as factories are laying people off. He and his wife can send their children to the local Catholic schools and pay for the dentist and put gifts under the tree and, as long as they are careful, can mostly live a comfortable working-class life with the respect of their townsfolk.

A quiet, thoughtful man, Bill is proud of being able to provide in this way. He grew up the child of an unmarried, but loving, mother in service to a kind-hearted local woman, and he knows that without those women (and the male gardener who also worked for the estate), he’d likely have gone down a much different path.

So, when, the Saturday before Christmas he makes a delivery to the local convent and discovers something he’s not supposed to see, it sends him into a spiral. How did he get to this point and how would his story have changed if things had played out differently in his and his mother’s past? What if the careful choices he’s been making have inadvertently hurt people and have protected people causing harm? And what choices do you make when you know the ripples from your actions will affect someone else, no matter what you do?

Keegan combines the same distinct sense of time and place with that timelessness that I associate with Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. And despite it taking place during my childhood, it read to me like something out of the 1950s, which I think both helps to give you the distance to process the story and underscores that this took place so recently.

This is a novella, so you could buy it or borrow it from the library this week and still read it before Christmas Eve, when the story ends. I highly recommend it to everyone.

A key part of our holidays every year is watching specials and movies, but while sometimes the tropes are old and the themes cheesy, it’s still fun to view them.

Last year, I made us bingo cards for the seasonal viewing we were doing and my mom and I had a lot of fun filling them in. So I made us new new boards for this year for this year.

Click through and you’ll be given a playing board. You can either play online or print it out. (If you hate the board you get, instructions for getting a different one are under “Help.” There are 30 different versions and over 50 categories, so don’t take one that you know you’ve got no shot at filling.)

I’d think back to what you’ve already seen so far this season, rather than moving forward from today, but YMMV. And if you’re a reader, rather than a viewer, most of these will work with your holiday-themed books, as well.

Let us know in the comments when you hit bingo! And have fun!